


The Guns at Last Light

by Monika-s Moniker (Dan_Francisco)



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Action, Alternate Universe, Black Eagles Mercedes von Martritz, Black Eagles Raphael Kirsten, Blood, Canon-atypical violence, Drama, F/M, Guns Exist, Historical References, Kissing in the Rain, Pegasus Cavalry, Romantic Rain, Tanks Exist, Urban Combat, War, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29983632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dan_Francisco/pseuds/Monika-s%20Moniker
Summary: As the war in Fódlan draws to a close, Mercedes and Raphael must survive yet another battle.
Relationships: Raphael Kirsten/Mercedes von Martrtz
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	The Guns at Last Light

**Author's Note:**

> Promptfill for the r/fanfiction Trope Bingo event! Corner pocket, cue ball, trope was Romantic Rain.

_Arianrhod, Holy Kingdom of Faerghus_

_31 st of the Lone Moon, Imperial Year 1185_

_1755 hours_

“Down the street!”

The sound of a machine gun rang out and echoed. Somewhere else in the city, the clatter of a Faerghusian M79 filled Mercedes’s ears. Friendly rifles popped around her, while on the other side of the street Caspar took cover behind a wall. Bullets threw up small clouds of dirt and dust between Mercedes’s little spot of cover and Caspar. How far away was it? She couldn’t tell.

“Popping smoke, popping smoke!” Behind her, Raphael lobbed a pair of smoke grenades over the wall and into the street.

“Which direction down the street?!” Caspar yelled. “East?!”

“No, southwest!” Mercedes shouted back.

Another burst of machine gun fire cascaded down the road. The Imperial soldier next to Mercedes took a bullet and flopped over on the ground, a low guttural yelp emanating from his lips. On instinct Mercedes slung her rifle behind her back and pulled out a bandage, dragging the poor soldier deeper behind cover before applying first aid.

“Smoke should be billowing!” Raphael called out. “Cross when you can!”

The soldier groaned, watching as Mercedes bandaged his arm up. He’d be okay – a grazing wound at worst, but he could still fight. “Thanks, Doc. There’s a guy on that rooftop down the street.”

“Which rooftop?” Raphael asked. “The building on the left or the right?”

Mercedes glanced up to see Caspar just barely peeking out of cover. The smoke must have covered the street by now. “Okay, I’m crossing!”

“It’s the rooftop on the right,” the soldier said.

“Okay, keep moving!” Raphael ordered. They disengaged from the exposed street, running down a series of narrow alleyways and side streets while the sounds of combat from the western part of Arianrhod grew louder and ever closer. Mercedes found herself approaching a rise in the earth, where a common area surrounded a handful of small apartment buildings. Combat engineers from the Imperial Army were constructing a hasty forward operating base just in front of the least damaged one – already they had assembled a heavy machine gun bunker out of sandbags and an observation post on a half-destroyed security office. In the blink of an eye, the skies darkened as rain began to pour on Arianrhod and soaked the Imperial and Kingdom armies as they struggled over the ancient city. Above her head, long trails of orange-tipped rocket artillery sailed and collapsed on a distant part of the city. The resultant explosions echoed and sounded like a tornado she had once been caught in when she was fourteen. Shells from long-range guns and the Imperial Army’s horde of self-propelled mortars slammed into nearby buildings and shattered old apartment blocks, with Kingdom artillery replying in kind as the long-range fire support duel raged over their heads.

“There they are!” an engineer shouted. She pointed down the cobblestone road that met the main highway. Just down the slope, another squad of Kingdom infantry had appeared, immediately engaging the combat engineers and Mercedes’s squad. Raphael immediately took cover behind a pile of sandbags alongside Caspar, while Mercedes took the wounded soldier over to the other side closer to the engineers. She could barely hear anybody else speak over the din of gunfire and explosions that had taken over Arianrhod.

“You, you and you!” Mercedes said, pointing to a few combat engineers. “Come with me! We can flank them and take some of the pressure off!” The engineers nodded, grabbing spare magazines and grenades from an ammo crate built nearby. Somebody got on the machine gun and started firing it, forcing the Kingdom soldiers to duck and find cover. She, the wounded man and the three combat engineers sprinted down a broken cinderblock wall around a half-decimated apartment block, revealing the dusty and trash-littered street ahead of them. Hasty barricades and the husks of destroyed light vehicles dotted the road and separated her impromptu unit from the Kingdom squad. She could see them shouting at each other and preparing for a grenade assault.

“You two, head to that armored car there,” Mercedes directed. She knelt down, undoubtedly getting her dress covered in dirt if it wasn’t already. How much of her veil was dirty by now? It likely didn’t matter, but she’d still have to find time to wash it out a little. Her chestrig only had one grenade left in it from the day’s combat – any more fighting and she risked running out of grenades and ammunition entirely.

The engineers had made it to the car by now. Mercedes nodded at them and began to open fire, causing general chaos among the Kingdom infantry just down the street. They panicked and tried to fire back to little effect, mostly missing for their efforts. They retreated even further down, but Mercedes paused. She could hear a tracked vehicle coming her way, but was unsure whether it was friendly or not. It could have been a friendly GT-82 or an enemy tank.

Seconds later, an enemy armored vehicle burst through a wall. Not a tank, but definitely not something she could easily tackle with her grenades either. The engineers began shouting over one another as the turret began to turn towards them, opening fire in a flurry of high-explosive shells as it rolled even further out into the road. The tracks left visible marks in the road and the autocannon left impacts where each shot landed. Some of the shells reached behind the armored car the engineers had hidden behind and blew one of them sky-high, his screams overpowering any other sounds. Mercedes couldn’t help but cringe, knowing she could do little to help. Her white magic could heal a lot of wounds, but this was well beyond her abilities.

“Fall back!” Mercedes shouted, urging the remaining engineers and her former patient to head back to the FOB. She had to do what little she could to help the engineer. Nothing else mattered right now. If she was lucky, then the enemy vehicle wouldn’t see her. If she was unlucky… well, maybe she could pray for a quick death. More gunfire echoed in her ears as the fighting began to inch ever closer to their little corner of hell.

The autocannon tore apart the ground as she ran, each hole almost immediately filled with rainwater as the shower reached torrential downpour status within mere minutes. The wounded engineer screamed and moaned in the middle of the street but each breath he uttered was less intense, a fading beacon that his life was soon ending. Mercedes practically dived behind cover where the engineer had returned to the earth while explosions seared the air around her. He was badly wounded and his blood lay on the street in a layer so dense it was difficult to see the tarmac below.

“Don’t worry,” she said, straining to be heard over the weapons fire. “It’ll all be alright.” Mercedes did what she could with her magic to ease his pain. If he was lucky, they could evacuate him to the rear and he could be treated. Maybe he could even go back home to the Empire and live out the rest of the war peacefully. It’d be a difficult life and hard to adjust to, but one she could envision and desperately prayed for regardless.

A single explosion boomed out from just beyond her cover. She realized that was the sound of the enemy vehicle being destroyed when the secondary detonation thundered. Somebody must have found an anti-tank launcher to deal with it. Mercedes happened to glance up and saw the Imperial Army’s Winged Hussars had arrived – the pegasus corps was one of the more prestigious elements of the Empire’s military, a fact they often bragged about when not loading up an obscene number of firearms to their steeds. These in particular traded out their shotguns for machine pistols upon landing, fanning out and securing the area.

“Let’s go!” a sergeant called, gesturing her arm forward. “I want this place secured, dammit!”

“Get the wounded first! B Troop, take that position!”

As the Winged Hussars began moving wounded soldiers and searching the enemy dead for intelligence, Mercedes realized she had lost track of Raphael since arriving at the FOB. The sky had grown just that little bit darker, and while most of the streetlamps had been broken by the day’s combat the few that were still working illuminated at least part of the street. She searched for him tirelessly, looking first among the wounded and not finding him among them. What if he had just been left for dead? Or trapped under some rubble, helpless even with all his strength? She felt sick to her stomach as even Caspar admitted he didn’t know where Raphael had gone.

Was this how it’d be? To lose Raphael at Arianrhod after all they had gone through together? Their time at Garreg Mach had been short but their time at war had been much longer. In a contradictory way it felt both too short but long enough, and yet she had never once been able to say anything. There was always a reason – the war would end soon, or it wasn’t the right time, or Raphael had other things to think about. All of that didn’t even go into the times she’d make a promise to herself to admit she loved him and then simply forgot to do so. At this point Mercedes could scarcely tell whether the dampness on her face was from her own tears or the rain.

“Mercedes!”

She stopped dead in her tracks. A smile cross her face as she turned around to see Raphael standing in the rain with her, his rifle by his side and lifting off his helmet. He chuckled as she ran to him, dropping the rifle and helmet on the ground and wrapping his arms around her. She could melt away in his bear hugs any day of the week.

“They said you were behind the car,” Raphael said quietly. “When I saw the blood I…”

“I’m okay,” she replied. “I’m okay. You’re okay. I love you.”

Raphael’s embrace somehow got tighter. “I love you too, Mercedes.”

If there was still gunfire elsewhere in Arianrhod, she didn’t hear it. Nothing else mattered now. Raphael was safe, she had finally told him, and they had managed to survive another battle and came out on top. She leaned up and kissed him, which he immediately returned. When all was said and done, they could go back home, get married, and live life peacefully together. Mourn their lost friends, what had been won, and wait to see where the future would take them. Until then, there was still more fighting to do until Fódlan was united.

**Author's Note:**

> Though I know ultimately it matters little, a lot of the tech is a strange and hellish mix of whatever I find most interesting, therefore;  
> A "Faerghusian M79" is roughly an StG 44.  
> Mercedes, Raphael and Caspar, alongside other Imperial soldiers, carry what are effectively Pedersen rifles with toggle actions similar to the Luger.  
> A GT-82 is broadly similar to wheeled Communist Chinese armored personnel carriers with little or no armament.  
> The "enemy vehicle" Mercedes encounters is tracked and broadly similar in general shape to an M2 Bradley or Warrior IFV.  
> The Winged Hussars use shotguns like the Winchester M1897 and usually carry Škorpion vz. 61 lookalikes, while their carbines are shortened versions of the Pedersen rifles.


End file.
